Executive Debrief
Your organization will face pressure from the following areas: Financial - Financially all organizations are under pressure to perform. The minimum requirement is to make a profit by either increasing revenue or reducing expenses. Operational - Operationally you are asked to do more with less. This means looking for inefficiencies, eliminating non value producing assets or automating processes. Marketplace Pressure - Competition is constantly chipping away at customer bases. Growing, maintaining and delivering value are always a challenge. Supply Chain Pressure - In today’s competitive environment it is imperative to reduce the number of suppliers while strengthening relationships and maintaining quality. PrinterRx is focused in assisting your organization in 3 of the 4 primary pressure areas: 1. Financial- Reduction of expenses associated with printing related activities. It is estimated that printing costs consume as much as 3% of your company’s revenue each year! 2. Operational- Automate print related helpdesk calls and reduce IT support cost. Up to 40% of your current help desk call traffic will be print related! 3. Supply Chain- Reduce the number of vendors, manufacturers and service providers based on real performance data. Utilize data to make better sourcing decisions, consolidate buying processes and eliminate departmental ad hoc purchases. Consulting and Discovery Services Learn More
Grant's Tech Tip
Before installing PrinterRx, you need to ensure that the tcp/ip ports used by PrinterRx are available. These ports must be open on the computer running PrinterRx as well as on various routers that PrinterRx will be using. PrinterRx needs ports (udp and tcp): 80 (http), 161, 162(SNMP), 515(lpr), 2722(pDesktop), 9100(HP raw data port).
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Comments heard after a PrinterRx installation
I didn't know we were printing that much! We have that many printers! Wow, I didn't know we had that much toner inventory! There are how many desktop printers?
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| What is Printer Lifecycle management?
Most solutions look at a snapshot in time to track, optimize
& identify cost savings. To do this, Guesstimate and approximations for costs are used. To fully determine printing costs, as a minimum, you need to understand your user printing behavior over a period of time. Better yet, to fully optimize your printer fleet and downsize your printing costs, the printers should be tracked through its entire lifecycle. Your print strategy tool should address inventory and its changes through time, maintenance, supplies and the associated vendors. The information should allow you’re to decide when to retire printers
& which printer/manufacturer is most cost effective as a replacement. Your strategy decision tool should be independent from the hw vendor. Relying on the manufacturer to decide which device is most cost effective for you is not in line with his objective – to sell more, which is usually ink
& toner. For a Printer Fleet Lifecycle Management Strategy an Enterprise-level print cost management system is essential. It should: Track all device activities, supplies,
& costs Monitor
& Update actual expenses Notify service technicians Remove expensive
& problem devices Automatically accounting for new printers
& the ability to retire printers Provide analysis of total cost of printing
& yield (¢/pg) comparisons
Desktop printers are often the most expensive component of your printing fleet. Not only are the supplies most expensive, costing more that expensive champagne, but are underutilized and have excessive supply costs in inventory. The result is often the highest per page cost. Tracking desktop printers is the most difficult technically
& logistically. Finally, the value of the printing or vendor contract should be analyzed using actual expenses. This is extremely important. Once you have the actual costs from maintenance, supplies
& usage, calculation of per page costs is trivial. This leads to a cost comparison of the different printers types, and more importantly, valuable data for your Enterprise print strategy.
Total Cost of Printing Revealed
Most people look at printing costs as paper
& ink, which are just the tip of the iceberg. Studies consistently show that the bulk of the costs are often the misunderstood
& ignored costs associate d with supporting the network printers. As you can see in the picture, a major part of the cost component is below the surface of the cost iceberg. Studies show that ¼ of help desk calls are print related. And how much productivity is lost on reprinting, looking for lost jobs
& walking back & forth to printers/ managing printing devices & reducing problems? This can result in a huge expense to you or your clients. Many corporations may have as low a ratio as 2:1 employees to printers. With this low utilization rate, the below the surface costs become even greater that the iceberg tip.. This information drives us to discover what really comprises printing costs. We need to drill down to define
& quantify these costs. In PrinterRx, we break Printing costs into 3 components: 1. Printing costs These are the costs you typically think of: paper, ink, and toner (the tip of the iceberg). And as you can see, they make up a small portion of the actual costs. Also, many tools use printer manufacturers’ estimates of per page costs – based upon assumed coverage of ink. Is this coverage correct? Probably not, especially since printing behavior has changed with color
& the internet. 2. Overhead costs These are the infrastructure
& management costs which includes floor space for printers & storage, printer asset a mortization or lease, and network man agement and administration including IS staff, software
& network hardware. The more you print the more traffic you have to manage on your network. When you are tracking printer service
& supplies in PrinterRx , these consumable costs are put into overhead. As a cost at a fixed point, these costs are not in per page units as in printing costs. If you do not track supplies
& use manufacturer estimates of printing costs (¢/pg), then consumables
& supplies are included in printing costs. 3. . Downtime costs This is really a productivity penalty for printers that go down because they jam, are out of paper or go down for other reasons that often require service. These include labour costs not only for administrators fixing the printers, but users walking up to the printers
& reprinting jobs. These costs are often not considered in comparative device costs. As devices age, the downtime costs can rise considerably. In PrinterRx, non-critical printers can be assigned a low priority which reduces the downtime cost.
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